What if your startup’s first hire wasn’t a person—but an AI agent? This provocative question was at the heart of a semester-long collaboration between Microsoft and NYU Stern’s Tech MBA program. Thirty students, divided into six startup-style teams, were given access to Microsoft 365 Copilot with the latest agent capabilities and asked to reimagine how work gets done when AI is embedded from day one. Their mission: break traditional workflows, build “Frontier Firm” companies, and explore the future of human-agent collaboration.
We envision Frontier Firms as organizations that don’t just adopt AI, but are built around it. These companies embed AI agents into every function from day one, redesigning workflows, decision-making, and team structures to maximize human-AI collaboration. In the context of this project, the Frontier Firm model challenged students to move beyond automation and explore what it truly means to lead and scale an organization where AI is a foundational team member—not an add-on.
The results were a blend of inspiring, disruptive, and sobering. Beyond just using AI for execution, the most successful teams sought to unlock AI’s ideation potential—building org charts, reshaping pitch decks, and providing hypothetical business models for human leaders to react to. Along the way, they uncovered a new paradigm for work—one where AI is a proactive, evolving team member.
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